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Saturday, November 17, 2012

India Ink and a Better Black

I’ve been looking for a cheap source for black inking.I’ve tried making my own from art store supplies.Beautiful Blacks in acrylic and oil based fluids.These paints and inks didn’t work.So What I’ve tried is good ole’ India ink.I washed out a SU stamp pad, I love the size of these pads they fit my hand and I can ink up my big background stamps easily!I wanted to use a water proof formula, as I do a lot water coloring with my stamping. Normal "stamping" inks run around 5.00 per half ounce, Good India Ink is about 24.00 for 32 ounces!! So you can see I am hoping this will be the ink and refill of economical choice!

I like the SU pads, they are a great sized and the new foam hold a lot of ink. I washed out a pad with a color called Starfruit. The color in my opinion was a real fail. So if the experiment didn't work I didn't loose a pad of value to me!. I inked up one corner, wanting to see how the ink would react to the foam. These inks have who knows what in them and some have resins that become Crunchy on some surfaces (found that out on other experiments!!) I let this sit over night to see if it was usable in morning.

It seemed fine with a few test stamps, so I went ahead and Inked up the whole pad. This took about 4 dropped fulls of ink. Smeared it around to even it out .

Next I was forced out of my craft room, my husband didn't understand the extreme importance of what I was doing and thought it would be a good Idea for us to go to our Class and then do something fun (that didn't involve stamping). So I left home, went to class, had fun, made dinner and went out again for more fun (Barnes and Noble and I got a Latte and read stamp magazines - That is fun!!). When I came back to my room, the ink had settled nicely into the foam and stamping a good clear black image was very easy.

Not the best picture, but the inking was very good, next i tried watercolors and my TH distress markers (water based)

This worked great! no smearing what so ever! It also worked with my Stickles - no smearing!

It did not work with my alcohol markers, they smeared. That is okay, I can use Stazon for that, I rarely use the alcohol markers. My preferred methods of coloring are watercolor, chalk and Colored pencil. I was very excited to discover that the India ink held up to both baby oil and mineral spirits that I use with the colored pencils! YAY! Now before I go an buy a gallon of India ink, I will wait to see how the ink and pad hold up together for a few weeks. I am concerned about it drying out to fast or getting crunchy.

Thanks for Stopping by, I hope you found this interesting!**** I am posting this a little while later, in case you have come to this post after 11/12.Trying out the India Ink on a stamp ended up being a total fail, the shellac and resin in India ink set up and caused a drying out of the foam and in general totally ruined it. What did end up working beautifully was printer ink and you can read about that here along with a traditional ink pad comparison!!***

Beautiful bird card.. I am curious about the India ink also. I used to use it for Chinese watercolor classes I took one time.. or something similar. REcently I've seen a lot of advertising for India Ink.

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